Leningrad, August 1973. The arrested Elizaveta Voroniansky is interrogated in the KGB. After five days of interrogation, emaciated, with cracked lips and burning eyes (as her neighbor in the cell recalled), Voronianskaya does not stand up and talks about the existence of a manuscript hidden from friends. They let her go, and Voronyanskaya returned to her room in a communal apartment on Romenskaya Street. There she will be found in the noose. And the manuscript will be in the hands of the security services. Four months later, on December 28, 1973, a book that aroused such fear from the Soviet authorities was published in Paris.
It was Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel The Gulag Archipelago. The whole world learned about the colossal scales of the Soviet camp system, which grinded tens of millions of lives. This indictment against the communist regime became one of the most famous books of the 20th century. But how could this book, written in the strictest secrecy, be able to see the light? This is told by French documentary filmmakers in his film.
The story of the history of the creation and publication of the book covers the period from 1945, when at the end of the war the 26-year-old captain of artillery Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sentenced to 8 years of camps, until 1976, when the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn expelled from the country for two years living abroad, and the translations and re-releases of his "Archipelago" month after month swiftly spread around the world.
"I fulfilled my duty to the dead, it gives me relief and calm. This truth was doomed to be destroyed, it was slaughtered, drowned, burned, ground into powder. But here it is connected, alive, printed, and this is never anyone to erase, "- wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn.